[3.1][HC] The Black Plague Berserker [Built around Death's Oath & Abberath's Hooves]

Is there any 3.2 update?

I was hoping to see more discussion of this build after 3.2 also. I had a spell casting berserker which was rendered nonfunctional by the patch, and I looked around for a novel build to try on him and found this one.

I can't currently afford two of the key items, the boots and amulet, but I threw together something with things I had on hand. I was surprised that with this setup and unleveled gems that right away I could fly through low level maps. As my gems have leveled I am now into mid tier with few problems.

There are a few things I did run into that need work. The first is that I don't have as much life regen or leech as I might like. If I just run through a map at normal speed (I have 30% boots), I take damage at a slow rate, but faster than my regen. So I have to use flasks frequently. I thought of trying life leech on my shield charge to see if that helps.

The other problem is boss killing. Its pretty slow, and I see that one possible solution is swapping to a 6 linked staff to make use of essence drain for this purpose. My problem is I'm rather dependent on my shield at present for stat balancing, so I've just got essence drain on a 4 linked helm. Speeds things up some, but boss fights last a long time even in the low tiers.

Also, without the Impresence amulet, despair plus enfeeble causes MoM to run you out of mana frequently. This is not that bad, since the damage and curse auras keep on working, but you lose shield charge and abyssal cry for a time.

I'd be happy to hear about others experiences playing a budget version of this build.

Following up on my above post. I wanted to do something about the mana and regen issues, so I got rid of the 4 nodes leading to Whispers of Doom (extra curse), and went with just the one curse (despair). I put the points into life regen nodes. This makes the build more playable for the time being. I would only go back to dual curse if one was free, as happens with the recommended amulet.

I guess I am the only one playing with this build right now, but here is what I've tried lately.

I still do not have a chaos impresence amulet, so I am foregoing enfeeble.

I ran across a shield called Broken Faith, which adds some life leech to chaos damage. Trying that out.

I also now have the Abberath boots, though they don't seem as impressive as I had hoped.

I did not like trying to hit things with essence drain while moving all the time (usually missed), so I tried doing ED via a spell totem. Sort of worked, but not great. So now I'm trying to leverage the leech from the shield by channeling wither with CwC to cast ED. This means facetanking to some extent, and works with weaker bosses but is still dangerous.

So my pattern now is to shield charge into groups, hit abyssal cry (explodes group), then channel wither/ED onto whatever is left. I still need more leech to last for tougher bosses, so I intend to try life leech support on the wither group. Not sure whether that works or will be enough.

Some final things I tried. I switched from MoM and a single curse to not-MoM and the dual curse (enfeeble) setup. Plays better in most respects (no mana issues), but lowers my one-shot level enough to cause some deaths in higher maps.

I also switched my wither/essence drain combo to blight/essence drain, and added volley support so ED hits more often. I also moved these from rare gloves to the Embalmer gloves to see if something would trigger vile toxins. I can't tell for sure but the net of recent changes is I'm killing faster.

I don't know if I really want to charge into packs to get the most from Abberaths Fury, or if I just want to approach the pack and start channeling blight. I'm mostly doing the latter and am usually safer.

The big shortcoming of this build for me is still inability to kill map bosses quickly or survive their heavier hits. However it is amazingly fast at clearing white and yellow map trash.

This has been a fun diversion and something to do with my unused berserker, but I realize that this build originated when berserker was a more suitable ascendancy. The rage mechanic does not look useful here, and in fact dangerous. I think I may try this build again on a trickster, when I get around to leveling one. I won't get the heal from abyssal cry, but will get life regen and various DoT multipliers. Seems like the natural ascendancy to use going forward.